Abortion activists in the US were smugly confident that they had mastered the abortion situation when the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the year 2000, under the US presidency of Bill Clinton, approved the use of the abortion pill. (It was approved in Canada in 2008.) However, the FDA approval provided a number of conditions for its use, namely, the requirement that it be prescribed by a physician after consultation, with a second consultation required two weeks later to determine that no fetal parts of the unborn child remained. In 2016, under President Obama, the use of the pill was extended from seven weeks after conception to ten weeks after conception. In 2021, President Joe Biden declared that the above restrictions on the pill were no longer required, and that henceforth, women could obtain the abortion pill by mail without medical consultation.
The FDA decision, made in 2000, was a political not a scientific decision. It was based on the preposterous position that the abortion pill was a required medical service because pregnancy was “a serious or life-threatening illness.” The decision also ignored growing data that the abortion pill created medical risks to women.
This FDA ruling was appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on August 16, 2023. The court handed down its decision that required the restoration of the critical safeguards made in 2000 for the use of this pill, including the requirements that the pill be prescribed by a physician after consultation and that there be a follow-up examination. It also required that the restriction that the abortion pill be available only up to seven weeks gestation be restored.
However, this decision was put on hold until the US Supreme Court reviews it early next year.
In the meantime, the abortion pill is still being taken by women, despite the fact that there is more and more evidence of its high risks.
Finally, it is telling that the FDA had decided, in 2001, that adverse data for the use of the pill be limited to data on the deaths of women using the pill, and that there was no longer a requirement that other harms the pill causes to women be recorded. In this regard, the Fifth Circuit Court bluntly stated that it is “unreasonable for an agency to eliminate the reporting requirements for the use of a drug and then use the resulting absence of data to support its decision.”
The abortion pill is causing harm and death. Hopefully, this unacceptable situation will be rectified by the US Supreme Court.